Much better to see it for what it is than to be perennially disappointed.With a hefty new mortgage, a frustrating career as a newspaper columnist and a flailing relationship with a married co-worker, Jo Liddell is resigned to living a less-than-perfect life.That is, until she crosses paths with Joe Bannister – a celebrated foreign correspondent returning home to care for his dying father. Against all her natural instincts, Jo finds herself falling for Joe, and with his help begins to realise that she might deserve to be happy after all. But when she decides to take the plunge and give love a chance, the results are catastrophic. And so Jo must fight hard for everything she never believed in – success, self-acceptance, and above all, real love.

    The novels that followed established her as a master of Southern Gothic. "McCullers' gift," writes Joyce Carol Oates, "was to evoke, through an accumulation of images and musically repeated phrases, the singularity of experience, not to pass judgment on it." McCullers effortlessly conveyed the raw anguish of her characters and the weird beauty of their perceptions. Set in small Georgia towns that are at once precisely observed and mythically resonant, McCullers' novels explore the strange, sometimes grotesque inner lives of characters who are often marginal and misunderstood. Above all, McCullers possessed an unmatched ability to capture the bewilderment and fragile wonder of adolescence. In The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, an enigmatic deaf-mute draws out the haunted confessions of an itinerant worker, a young girl, a black doctor, and the widowed owner of a small-town café. Two shorter works, Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) and The Ballad of the Sad Café (1943), use melodramatic scenarios and freakish characters to explore the disfiguring violence of desire. The Member of the Wedding (1946), on which the play and film were based, tells of a young girl's fascination with her brother's wedding and is perhaps McCullers' most moving and accomplished novel. In Clock Without Hands (1960), the story of a terminally ill druggist, McCullers produces some of her most forceful and indignant social criticism. Edited by Carlos Dews.

    Then, just when he's convinced his life has passed him by, Sonny, by a stroke of fate, is given a second chance at living. Can he get it right?  Will he be able to evade the grinding loneliness that stalks him? Will he find a way to overcome the unbearable regret that haunts him? Will he ever risk loving again, to find someone with no good-byes in her heart? And, most of all, will he become the man he always could have been?

    Oriana has returned to the village she grew up in for the first time in years. Staying with her mother and stepfather, she's guarded about what has caused the break up of her relationship and her return home from America. But as she finds herself increasingly drawn to Windward, the huge house that was the chaotic artists' community where she was born, it becomes clear that there is more to be untangled from the past than the present.

    He is a former MP, unseated by the expenses scandal, who is now spending time abroad to recover from a major illness. The other purpose of his stay is to write his memoirs in order to demonstrate that he was unfairly pilloried for 'a minor accounting error', having valiantly served his country for 30 years. He settles into his new surroundings but soon it becomes clear that all is not as it seems. For a start Bobby seems to have no memory of the immediate past. Each time he sits down to continue his memoirs he finds only a blank page. Every morning as he comes downstairs the same scene replays itself in front of him: a young woman and her son pass him on the stairs. And what has become of his wife?

    In these four stand-alone novels, Kinsella’s charming heroines juggle work life, love life—and sometimes, even the afterlife—to heartwarming and hilarious effect. This must-have eBook bundle includes:CAN YOU KEEP A SECRET?“Move over, Bridget [Jones]! . . . Kinsella’s witty take on mundane office and family life will really make you laugh out loud.”—Evening Chronicle (UK)Emma Corrigan has a huge heart, an irrepressible spirit, and a few little secrets. Secrets from her boyfriend, secrets from her mother . . . secrets she wouldn’t share with anyone in the world. Until she spills them all to a handsome stranger on a plane, who, she later discovers, just so happens to be Jack Harper, her company’s elusive CEO—a man who now knows every humiliating detail about her.THE UNDOMESTIC GODDESS“Another charming winner from the delightful Kinsella.”—BooklistSamantha Sweeting, a workaholic attorney at a London law firm, has just made a huge, unthinkable mistake, wrecking her chance of becoming partner. Going into utter meltdown, she walks out of her office, boards a train, and ends up in the middle of nowhere. Asking for directions at a big, beautiful house, she’s mistaken for an interviewee and is offered a job as their housekeeper. And as she figures out how to turn on the oven and how to open the #@%# ironing board, she finds that this new life may be exactly what she is looking for.REMEMBER ME?“A delicious page-turner.”—USA TodayWhen twenty-eight-year-old Lexi Smart wakes up in a London hospital, she’s in for a big surprise. Having survived a car accident, Lexi has lost a big chunk of her memory—three years to be exact—and somehow she’s gone from being a twenty-five-year-old working girl to being a corporate big shot with a sleek loft, a personal assistant, and a gorgeous husband. Will she ever remember how this all came to be? And what will happen when she does?TWENTIES GIRL“Kinsella [is] a master of comic pacing and feminine wit.”—Publishers WeeklyLara Lington’s imagination seems to be in overdrive. Normal twenty-something young women don’t get visited by ghosts. Or do they? When the spirit of Lara’s great-aunt Sadie mysteriously appears, she has one request: Lara must find a missing necklace that was in Sadie’s possession for more than seventy-five years. And in their mission, these very different “twenties” girls learn some surprising truths from and about each other.BONUS: This eBook bundle also includes an excerpt from Sophie Kinsella's Wedding Night.

    The second is the reason I'm here. When Alexandra discovers that her husband Philippe is having an affair, she can’t believe he’d risk losing the love that has transformed both their lives.Still in shock, Alexandra finds herself powerfully attracted to a much younger man. Jean-Luc Malavoine is twenty-three, intense and magnetic. He’s also the son of Philippe’s best friend.With every increasingly passionate liaison, Alexandra is pulled deeper into a situation that threatens everyone she holds dear.Beautifully told through the boulevards and arrondissements of the City of Light, Paris Mon Amour is a sensual novel about inescapable desire and devastating betrayals. It is the story of one woman and two men, and what happens when there is no way out.‘A truly emotional ride. A story of lust, love and loss with a beautifully described Paris as its backdrop. I galloped through it in a couple of days’ Claire Fuller, author of Our Endless Numbered DaysIsabel Costello is the host of the Literary Sofa blog, which features authors from new talent to New York Times bestselling novelists. Guest writers on the blog have included Patrick Gale, Linda Grant, Tracy Chevalier and Karen Joy Fowler. She read Modern Languages (French and German) at Oxford, before pursuing a career in marketing and communications. She is now a full-time writer, and lives in London.

    A two-timing pornographer becomes an unwilling object in the fantasies of one of his victims. A jaded millionaire buys himself the perfect mistress and plunges into a hell of jealousy and despair. And in the course of a weekend with his teenage daughter, a guilt-ridden father discovers the depths of his own blundering innocence.At once chilling and beguiling, and written in prose of lacerating beauty, In Between the Sheets is a tour de force by one of England's most acclaimed practitioners of literary unease.

    She had not wanted to commit herself. He worked with his hands, on a bench instead of a desk. He was Mr. Wrong. And yet she loved him. Seventeen years later he reappears. It unnerves her. Does he love her still? Does he hate her? They are middle-aged, they've lost their looks (he has lost his job). But they remember vividly how rapturous it was between them.

    Federal Reserve Board, finds himself in jail - suddenly, inexplicably, imprisoned by the Swiss police. He is accused of committing massive frauds in the financial markets, allegedly netting him over $450 millon. The case against him seems ironclad - almost too perfect. It is nearly certain that he will be convicted and will spend thirty years doing hard labor in a Swiss prison. He has been framed - set up. Charlie's wife, Sally, in her efforts to find diplomatic support and effective legal defense for him, is frustrated at every turn. No one in Switzerland or the United States seems able - or even willing - to help. But neither Charlie nor Sally will give up; they will not agree to a proposal of a lesser prison term in exchange for his pleading guilty. Then, one evening, a mysterious stranger offers Sally a deal. Gradually, and in colorful detail, we learn why and how Charlie was framed and what he and Sally must do to uncover and expose the financial conspiracy that has set him up. And what they learn launches them, at virtually a moment's notice, on an exciting but dangerous journey, one they hope will lead to Charlie's freedom and clear his name.

    This is a work that resonates with Vonnegut's singular voice: the magic sound of a born storyteller mesmerizing us with truth."Vonnegut is at the top of his form, and it is wonderful."--Newsday

    We Follow The Ups And Downs Of Mr Starlight's Career As He Heads To The Bright Lights Of America, As Seen Through The Eyes Of Cled, His Brother.

    Johann Fausten dem wietbeschreyen Zauberer und Schwartzkunstler, or History of Dr John Faust the notorious Magician and Necromancer, as written by his familiar servant and disciple Christopher wagner, now for the first time Englished from the Low German.

    Nicholson has a wonderful ear for the unintentionally funny cliches of modern speech and manners.” –Sunday Telegraph

    They are stories about the woods, houses hidden in the gaps between mountains. Behind them, the skeletons of old and powerful machines rust into the slate and leaves. Water red with iron leeches from the empty mines and pools near a stone foundation. The boy there plays in the bones because he is a child and this will be his childhood. He watches while winter comes falling slowly down over the road. Sometimes he remembers a girl, her hair and the perfume she wore. These are stories about her and where she might have gone. He waits for sleep because in the next story he will leave. The boy watches an airplane blink red past his window. From here, you can't hear its violence.